Query Processing in a Parallel Object-Relational Database System

Object-relational database systems are now being deployed for real use by customers. Researchers and industry users have begun to explore the performance issues that these systems raise. In this paper, we examine some of those performance issues, and evaluate them for object-relational systems in general and for INFORMIX-Universal Server in particular. We describe objectrelational query processing techniques and make some predictions about how they will evolve over the next several years. 1 Introduction Since the middle 1970s, with the advent of the relational model and the appearance of working systems with which to experiment, academic and industry researchers have spent considerable time and energy inventing ways to make queries in relational databases run faster. Most relational database systems were sold to businesses, so most researchers concentrated on speeding up business query processing. The creation and use of indices, access path selection, cache structure and management, ..